Let's discuss which Indiana Jones movie is the best (for the seventy-second time), which music you hate (along with seldom TOP N lists), which books made you nerdier and which carbohydrates taste better.

Actually this is convenient, because I was planning on hopefully derailing another topic with this:

How do you people steal music nowadays? Did Bittorrent take over that too, because that seems awfully inconvenient for such small files. I used to use Soulseek, but that hasn't been returning any results for me lately, and it looks like my backup theft software Limewire went legit. Is there anything still relatively simple and Napsterish, or is it back to the bad old days?

I finished Moby Dick recently. Well, most of it. I skipped most of the parts about whaling. If I can find a good audio version of Ulysses I'll listen to that, too, and then I'll feel good about reading whatever the hell I want for the rest of my life.

I like food, movies and literature. I like food the most. I would like to read more literature, but feel I'm a slow reader so I don't. I'd like to watch more movies, but after 1/2 hour or so I feel like I'd rather be gaming, if I have a game to play.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley

For recent stuff, I usually look up a torrent of the album on isohunt and then either select the one file out of the bunch, or often just say 'fuck it' and delete the remainders afterwards. For rare stuff there's always emule - it's slow as hell, but since it runs in the background anyway, a day or two doesn't bother me much.

'We run a pretty tight ship around here.' 'With a pool table?' 'It's a gaming ship.'

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley

As for the music, I use mininova/uTorrent, since it's fast and convenient. Soulseek is still good for downloading music, but it's often slow and yes, not exactly almighty. You can get also very good results if you can share som 100-200GB of stuff and run DC++ or similar (gnutella derivative) and find a good elite hub. (But I haven't done that for a while now because of my current ISP.)

But of course, the l33test way to download mp3 is to use Internet Explorer 6 on cracked Win XP SP0 with no firewall and anti-spyware and google for 'crack porn download free mp3'. (The 'porn' and 'crack' keywords for bonus spyware.)

I still use Soulseek combined with torrents combined with fruitlessly googling for mp3s on the web until I give up. Something I suppose I should get back to doing, unless I come to my senses and resubscribe to WoW...

How do you people steal music nowadays? Did Bittorrent take over that too, because that seems awfully inconvenient for such small files.

I use bittorrent. But then, I only ever steal full albums. I've often downloaded an entire discography for one song, then found I actually liked other songs by the band and loaded the whole thing into my ipod.

Some day I'll switch completely to iTunes (or something suitably iTunesian) and I'll start buying the songs I've had around for all these years.

Not having a go at you specifically gaggle.

I've heard pirates all around the place say this over and over. I've never actually heard of anyone actually following through with it though. It's always "some day" or "when the prices drop reasonably" or "when there is a subscription model" or "when the is a subscription model that has the indie rock I like to rock out to".

"Why would I wanna read the book? All I'm saying is, I see a game every day. I watch baseball every day. I have a better understanding about why things happen than the computer, because the computer only tells you what you put in it. I could make that computer say what I wanted it to say, if I put the right things in there. ... The computer is only as good as what you put in it. How do you think we got Enron?"

Yeah Owen, it's easy to wait and wait and wait. I would add that it is especially easy since a friggin' solution has yet to arrive! So I'm not exactly surprised if someone still waits.

iTunes is the obvious exception, but we're not all Mac users or want it to intrude on our Windows systems (I use Windows Media Player)

But if I ever switch to Mac I'll obviously use iTunes, and if I use iTunes I'll want to buy the music. I like legality. Though I'll add that a solution also needs to provide advantages over piracy. DRM schemes aren't so hot, nor is jumping through too many hoops. Steam is my favorite example, it brought downloadable purchasing to my doorstep.

I've heard pirates all around the place say this over and over. I've never actually heard of anyone actually following through with it though. It's always "some day" or "when the prices drop reasonably" or "when there is a subscription model" or "when the is a subscription model that has the indie rock I like to rock out to".

Then you can hear it now. I don't pirate music anymore, since iTunes does what I want for a price I'm willing to pay. Before itunes, yah. But not since.

Then you can hear it now. I don't pirate music anymore, since iTunes does what I want for a price I'm willing to pay. Before itunes, yah. But not since

Same here.

"Why would I wanna read the book? All I'm saying is, I see a game every day. I watch baseball every day. I have a better understanding about why things happen than the computer, because the computer only tells you what you put in it. I could make that computer say what I wanted it to say, if I put the right things in there. ... The computer is only as good as what you put in it. How do you think we got Enron?"

I've heard pirates all around the place say this over and over. I've never actually heard of anyone actually following through with it though. It's always "some day" or "when the prices drop reasonably" or "when there is a subscription model" or "when the is a subscription model that has the indie rock I like to rock out to".

Then you can hear it now. I don't pirate music anymore, since iTunes does what I want for a price I'm willing to pay. Before itunes, yah. But not since.

Yeah, iTunes is pretty awesome. I use beatport.com for some more electronic type stuff too. To be clear, I was talking specifically to gaggles point that he would go back and buy the music he had pirated to that point. I know plenty of people who use iTunes or a similar service.

Score another for iTunes. It's got maybe 90% of the stuff I'm looking for. The stuff it doesn't is usually some filler song off an album I used to own that I liked.

As for books, I've been reading some of the BFI Film Classics books. These are some pretty good scholarly studies of some great films, although some of the authors are a bit too high-falutin'. I got the ones for Greed, Metropolis, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and the one for Double Indemnity should be here tomorrow.

As for films, I saw the aforementioned Double Indemnity last week and loved it. This week, I'm going to try and watch Coppola's The Conversation.

Well there must be something up with my computer and/or firewall then, if you all can still use SoulSeek. Even searching for things that should return tons of results like "white stripes" (before you start typing, remember, no one cares about your opinion on the White Stripes) I'm getting nothing; I just assumed they shut down the network.

Maybe you could just buy the music...you know, like a grown up.

Is this some fucked up analogy, or are you actually getting holier then thou? Because the 'thou' in this case isn't in the mood to do this conversation again. Personally I'm a steal the single tracks, buy the albums, guy. Honestly I don't care if that's morally consistent or not, it's what I do and I happen to not care enough to get all PHIL101 about it.

Regarding food, today on my lunch break I went down the road to the local farmer's market and came back with armloads of farm-fresh veggies: purple carrots, purple potatoes, sweet banana peppers, orange tomatoes, heads of lettuce of a variety I've never seen before, blueberries, peaches, and other stuff. So I took my leftover rice, dumped it in a pan with some olive oil, some white wine, and some chicken stock, then chopped up some purple carrots, an orange tomato, and a banana pepper along with some lemon basil I cut from my deck. Goddamn, it's tasty.

I've always disliked tomatoes immensely. I thought I'd take a chance on these orange ones, and man, am I glad. They're sweet and awesome. And peaches, too -- I used to hate peaches, but these are super juicy and full of flavor.

Farmer's markets rock. I think I'll hit the one in Redmond on Saturday and pick up a shitload of berries to preserve.

I'm thinking very seriously about replacing my current collection of 2-channel stereo stuff(my favorites mostly) with DVD versions. Since getting my newest 6.1 home theater system, I've bought a few music DVD's and am amazed at how the listening experience changes in a multichannel environment. They're a tad bit more expensive than regular CD's, and by no means am I a diehard audiophile, but I'm really surprised that this hasnt taken off as the new mainstream way of listening to music at home.

I may very well be going the audiophile route now that I've experienced listening to music this way. I just cant see continuing to buy 2-channel stuff(for home listening) after experiencing this format.